The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys

If Henry Mayhew is remembered at all today, it is as author of London Labour and the London Poor, a series of articles on street traders, buskers, beggars and the like. He was also the editor of Punch and a novelist.

Mr and Mrs Sandboys – or, to give it its full title, 1851 the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family who Came up to London to Enjoy Themselves and to See the Great Exhibition – is not a great novel, but it is full of interesting period detail.

The Sandboys live in Buttermere. For Mr Sandboys there is no better place on earth. Everything he could possibly want is there, or is until the summer of 1851, when he finds that there are no newspapers and no groceries – all the tradesmen and shopkeepers having gone to London to see the Great Exhibition. If the Sandboys are not to starve, they have no option but to follow.

What unfolds is a story of innocents abroad. They catch the wrong train and end up in Glasgow, and when at last they are on the right train heading south they are fleeced by a conman. They are fleeced over their lodgings, fleeced by tradesmen and fleeced by just about everyone they meet. Eventually Mr Sandboys ends up in a debtors’ prison and is released the day after the Exhibition closes. He returns to Buttermere “vowing that if there was ever another Exhibition, he would never think of coming up to London again to enjoy himself.”

The value of the book is not in the story – the plot is a fairly ramshackle affair – but in the portrait of London in the summer of 1851. The crowds in the streets were enormous (see the picture of Regent’s Circus at the head of this post), the pressure on accommodation intense. Visitors were accommodated in basements and garrets at outrageous cost. One of the Cruikshank illustrations show the boxes in a West End theatre being let as B and Bs. (This is surely a joke on Cruikshanks’s part, but it gives some idea of the insatiable demand for  lodgings during the six months that the Great Exhibition lasted.) One answer to the lodgings problem was Harrison’s Hostel in Pimlico, which will form the subject of my next post.